Member Reports

I am fond of telling folks about my arts background, having grown up in the 1960s and ’70s in a town of two thousand people in central Wisconsin surrounded by cranberry bogs and paper mills. I didn’t see a professional arts performance until I was in high school, but from an early age my parents provided me with piano lessons and my school supplied me with an abundance of arts activities: bassoon lessons, chorus, marching band, art classes.

I was making my way home from the Financial District to the Mission on the train after work, feet pinched by the not-so-comfortable shoes I wore as part of my daytime drag, nose buried in some reading about cultural participation in the region while texting Ilia, one of the dancers in the group I sing with, about picking her up for rehearsal.

2009, 37 pages, Blueprint Research & Design, Inc., 720 Market Street, Suite 900, San Francisco, CA 94102, www.blueprintrd.com.

Los Lupeños de San José was founded in 1969 in San José, California. What began as a study-performance group formed to promote Mexican dance and culture grew over time to become one of California’s leading nonprofit organizations representing Mexican folklórico. From its inception, Los Lupeños has been a colorful cultural ambassador for San José and California, touring throughout the United States and Mexico performing a varied repertoire of dances from choreographers and teachers from both sides of the border.

My goal for putting together a session at the 2009 GIA Conference entitled: “Changing the Game: New Models, New Leaders, New Ideas for the Arts,” was to cast new light on old problems by enriching our collective conversation with new voices. I described it in the conference guide this way:

The recession has impacted all professions, and artists are no exception. As of 2001, there were more than 2.5 million working artists in the United States, representing a critical part of the entrepreneurial, independent workforce. In the summer of 2009, Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), in partnership with Helicon Collaborative and Princeton Survey Research International, developed the Artists and the Economic Recession Survey to provide high-quality and timely information to funders and artist service organizations.

When I was in college, I had a great work-study job at an organization that placed students in internships with local nonprofits. It was a small outfit and a jack-of-all-trades sort of job. I answered phones, mocked up application forms, stuffed envelopes, filed, ran errands, organized open houses, and learned how to write a business letter. It wasn’t the sort of job you’d want to stay in for too long, but it was a fabulous introduction to the nonprofit sector. It gave me practical office skills to boot.

I have visited groups of GIA members and nonmembers in every region of the country this year, from Boston to Los Angeles and Atlanta to Seattle. It has been an interesting first year as executive director of GIA, to say the very least. What I have observed is that grantmakers have not taken a “recess” during this challenging time. In many ways, for private and community foundations especially, there could have been a pulling away from grantees, a kind of “we can’t help you” attitude.

I have always revered the work of David McCullough and recently I read remarks he made last spring that focused his audience on arts education: